


And The Whole Sky Burned Against Us

by cridecoeur



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-02
Updated: 2012-08-02
Packaged: 2017-11-11 07:33:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/476124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cridecoeur/pseuds/cridecoeur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim is a Dream King. Sebastian is his favorite nightmare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And The Whole Sky Burned Against Us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EdenAziraphale](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EdenAziraphale/gifts).



> Well, this is not at all how I expected to come back into fandom. Hello people who read Jim/Sebastian, there are two things you need to know about me: 1) I am incapable of writing anything but AUs and 2) pretty much all of them involve supernatural elements. This happens to have both. It is kind of a dark story although if you read that pairing up there, you've probably guessed that by now. Also, this involves nightmare scenarios and murder. If you have an objection to either of those things, I would hit the back button now. Oh, right, and the title is from a poem by Wilfred Owen titled "Spring Offensive." I have bastardized a line, sorry about that. And this is both for Amanda and entirely her fault.

“The Little Red Riding Hood setup’s a little tried, don’t you think?” Sebastian said—he had a smooth rock in one hand and was eyeing a bird sitting on a nearby tree branch; the bird was singing in an annoyingly cheerful manner, as birds in forests were wont to do.

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Jim said—he spread his hands in a gesture that encompassed the whole forest around them and turned around once. “People fear tried and ordinary things most intensely—they’re the most insidious of all dreams.” Jim turned sharply and tapped Sebastian on the temple, once; Sebastian grunted, looking unimpressed. “You can put on your most terrifying face, but the less ordinary it becomes, the less grasp it has over a person, once they wake. People can tell themselves it wasn’t real about any dream, but the more supernatural the dream, the more easily they can believe it. Give them something familiar, though,” Jim gestured to the woods again, “something they’ll see again once they wake up, and the dreams become much harder to shake.” He smiled brightly. “Lingering fear is all about subtlety.” 

“That’s rich, coming from you,” Sebastian said, then narrowed his eyes and threw his rock—the bird made one startled, squawking noise, and tumbled to the forest floor, dead. Jim laughed. 

“I’m not the thing that goes bump in the night,” he said. “I’m just the one who employs him.” He fluttered his eyelashes at Sebastian. “Put on your game face, sweetheart, we’re about to begin.”

Sebastian grunted, but started slipping into another form, anyways.

#

Sebastian met Jim in a nightmare—that was how everyone met Jim; most people just didn’t survive the encounter. At the time, Sebastian had been in jail, freshly convicted of murder charges; he’d watched the jury go white-face and terrified, as each spectacular, gory photo was presented to them and felt nothing, least of all remorse. When he thought about it, all he could feel was the weight of the gun in his hand, the clean sound of each shot. He’d just been messy, this time, stupidly messy and gotten caught. If he regretted anything, it was losing his temper enough to make him stupid.

So Sebastian met Jim in a nightmare—not much of a nightmare, if you asked him, a flimsy illusion on the edge of a green-hot jungle, dark and jagged with shadows the moon cast across the forest floor, Sebastian crawling through foliage, smeared with dirt and who knew what else, tasting the rain on the air, electricity on the back of his tongue, and gutting a tiger with a knife he’d like to have in the real world, when the tiger decided to make things personal.

He heard someone clapping and turned around to find Jim standing behind him, striped with moonlight, looking sleek in a suit that was probably worth Sebastian’s life—Sebastian spit on the ground. 

“Well done!” Jim said. “Normally, I’d say I’m impressed you turned a nightmare on it’s head so thoroughly, but I don’t think you found it frightening, to begin with.”

“Because it wasn’t,” Sebastian said, wiping some of the blood of his face with the sleeve of his shirt—he wreaked of it, was soaked in it, hot and coppery. 

“Really?” Jim smiled; he had too many teeth in his mouth, all sharp—then he started to grow. The muscles in his arms, his legs, his chest began to strain the seams of his suit until it tore, entirely. His head rose towards the canopy. His skin turned black, the sort of black that sucked in light and left nothing. Jim opened his mouth, rows of sharp teeth, now, and his incisors long—Sebastian spit out the ground and hurled the knife he was holding into Jim’s gut. Jim made a wailing animal sound that shifted into laughter as he shrunk, again, back to being just a man, his suit neatly knitting itself back together.

“Ha ha!” he said. “Not afraid, at all.”

“Yeah, well,” Sebastian said. “Like I said, you’re not scary.”

Jim smiled, widely. “How would you like to make a deal?” he said, spreading his hands. He still had the knife in his gut. He didn’t seem bothered by it.

“Depends on the deal.”

“I’m in the business of nightmares,” Jim said. “You’re in the business of doing frightening things to your fellow human beings.”

Sebastian thought of the look every man and woman had in their eyes the moment before they died, when they knew they were going to die. “Close enough,” he said.

“I’d like to offer you a job,” Jim said. “You continue to be frightening, and I’ll get you out of your current predicament.”

Sebastian eyed Jim, skeptically. “How are you going to do that?” he said.

Jim smiled, again, all teeth. “By making you a nightmare, of course.”

#

Sebastian stalked through the woods—he wasn’t a wolf at least, humanoid but monstrous, white skinned, black eyed, straggly knots of hair, with a mouth full of jagged teeth and sharp-tipped fingers. The forest was thick, the trees grey-barked and looming, and the path was old, rarely trodden, overgrown. The girl he shadowed wore a red cloak—not a detail Sebastian found particularly inspiring or inspired—and darted glances at the forest around her. Sebastian had been fading in and out of the periphery of her vision, only snatches of him here and there, for what felt like—to the dreamer—hours, and he could feel the fear tightening around her, like a spring being compressed further and further.

Stepping out of the woods, finally, he watched her turn, watched her face go white and terrified—she screamed, turned to run, and he lunged after her.

#

“So how exactly do you get to be a Dream King?” Sebastian asked Jim, once. They were building a nightmare, winding through dark city streets, the scene gritty and raw, buildings with fractured windows, doors broken in, water pooling in the drains, and cars rusting away to nothing.

“How do you get to be anything?” Jim said. “By terrifying or murdering anyone who gets in your way.”

“Pretty sure that’s not a socially accepted form of advancement,” Sebastian said.

“Oh,” Jim said, cocking his head at Sebastian. “And how did you get where you are?”

Sebastian looked at the city around them, crumbling and desolate, thought of the number of times he’d fired a gun, the number of lives he’d ended, most of them even after he’d been discharged from the Army and said, “Pretty much the same way.”

#

The Dream World was strangely political, although it was given more to bloody revolutions, beheadings, and betrayals than a parliamentary election or the bestowing of a title. After the first time someone tried to kill Jim—once Sebastian had died in his prison cell and reawakened in a palace that looked more like a house of horrors than a place to rule from—Sebastian realized that Jim coming to him was strange. 

Of course, the recruitment seemed less strange once the attempted murderer was sprawled in front of Sebastian, face effectively beaten in, moaning brokenly, crushed hand cradled against his chest, leg most likely broken, in no shape to move anytime soon. 

“Sweetheart!” Jim said, holding his hands to his heart, when Sebastian turned towards him—he had blood on his knuckles and probably speckled on his face. “I’m touched!”

“Yeah, well,” Sebastian said. “You keep me in nightmares. So it wasn’t all for good feelings.”

Jim smiled, brightly. “Oh, of course,” he said. He looked down at his would-be-murderer, cocked his head to one wide, then smiled, more widely. “I have an idea!” He gestured with one hand and—in a swirl of smoke Sebastian was willing to be was mostly for show—a gun appeared in his hand. Not any ordinary looking gun, something old fashioned, black, with grinning theatre masks carved into the handle. 

“Here, I think you’ll like this,” he said and tossed the gun to Sebastian. Sebastian caught it, then turned it over in his hand once, before getting a good grip on it, leveling it at the man on the ground, and firing. 

What he expected was a bullet. What he got was a raucous wail, a fountain of smoke which converged again around the would-be-murderer, and the man screaming as if he were in the worst pain of his life. When the smoke cleared, his skeleton was the only thing left of him.

“Effective,” Sebastian said. He’d have considered feeling bad about it, if the man hadn’t just tried to behead Jim. As it was, he didn’t feel too broken up over it.

“I thought you’d like it!” Jim said. “Go ahead and keep it, I think you’ll have more fun with it than I would.”

Sebastian turned the gun over in his hand once more, watching whatever material it was made out of swallow the light that shone on it. “Thanks,” he said and found himself actually meaning it.

#

“I’m _bored_ ,” Jim said, one night—the first night since Sebastian had died that they weren’t either building a nightmare or invading someone’s dreams. Truth be told, Sebastian was bored, too, but he wasn’t about to show it. He’d played the sit-and-wait game so often in the Army, boredom almost didn’t mean anything to him, anymore, just something he had to sit through, until circumstances changed.

“So let’s do something,” Sebastian said. He was laying on the floor, staring up at one of the warped, mirrored ceilings of Jim’s—no there really wasn’t a word for it aside from “palace.” Jim even had a throne and crown because he was a prick. Sebastian tilted his head to one side, to find Jim peering down at him, wide eyed in that put-on way he had—usually put on right before he suggested beheading a rival king or collapsing a dream on someone he didn’t like. 

“But everything is boring,” he said. 

“You’re not 12,” Sebastian said. “Entertain yourself.”

“I am several hundred years old, and I will not be talked to like that,” Jim said, but did nothing more than drape himself entirely over the arm of his—seriously, it was a throne. He pouted down at Sebastian. “ _You_ entertain me.” 

Sebastian considered the situation for a moment. “I could teach you how to shoot a rifle,” he said, finally, and Jim smiled.

#

The first time they assassinated a rival king, Sebastian shot him in the head from two hundred yards away.

“Oh by the way,” Jim said. “That’s not going to kill him. You’d better get down there and behead him before he collects himself.”

Sebastian cursed but did what he was told.

#

The Dream World was an amalgamation of half-formed thoughts, illusions, and memories. Strangely, Jim’s palace, with its twisted halls and mirrored ceilings and doors that open onto nothingness, was the most put-together bit of Dream that Sebastian had ever seen. The rest of it was like looking in a fractured mirror, a hundred different views of the same thing, in pieces, with no whole to discover, no one thing to focus in on.

The first time Sebastian ventured out on his own he got irretrievably, idiotically lost. Idiotically because he was Jim’s man—Moriarty’s man, more to the point—and he was worth enough dead for it to be inconvenient. 

When he drew his gun, they paused—they always paused, apparently seeing it for what it is, when Sebastian hadn’t, not an ordinary gun, but a piece of nightmare meant for another nightmare—and a pause was all he needed. 

Jim showed up, six bodies in. “Well, isn’t this unnecessarily dramatic,” he said, then he transformed and tore one of the assailant’s head clean off. 

When all that was left of them were bodies on the ground, Jim turned to Sebastian and said, “ _You’re_ in trouble, wandering off where I couldn’t find you.” 

“Got lost,” Sebastian said. 

“This is why we don’t do things we’re not told to,” Jim said. “We always end up in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing.”

“You didn’t tell me not to do it,” Sebastian said.

“If I _don’t_ say to do it,” Jim said. “Then don’t do it.”

Sebastian looked down at the bodies on the ground. “Got it,” he said.

#

“Why don’t you go into dreams yourself?” Sebastian asked Jim, once, thinking of the time he’d stepped into Sebastian’s dream and the fact that he hadn’t seen Jim do it once, since.

“What sort of king goes into battle before his soldiers?” Jim said.

Sebastian pursed his mouth up.

“Oh, don’t worry, sweetheart, I won’t make you think too hard,” Jim said. “It’s the kind of king who ends up dead.”

#

Someone collapsed a dream on Sebastian. He wan’t surprised it happened; he expected it to happen sooner, honestly. The result was a fractured reality far worse than the Dream World at her most baffling; this was broken memories, broken illusions, and thoughts that wailed and crashed together, shattering into shrapnel; what was Jim and Sebastian’s constructed nightmare had now turned against Sebastian, and he couldn’t get out.

Sebastian spent three days in the dream, chased by shadows, monsters he’d been before and wasn’t now, falling through flimsy landscapes, hearing screaming and wailing and animal sounds—then Jim arrived, bringing light and, strangely, silence. Sebastian wasn’t about to complain, the harsh and constant noise set his teeth on edge, vibrated through him, making his bones ache.

“You’re a god damn angel,” Sebastian slurred, exhausted and half-delirious. 

“Oh, I’m going to remind you that you said that,” Jim said, then tore away the remains of the dream, until they were free, again, until Sebastian was collapsing on the floor of Jim’s dream palace. He’d never been so glad to see those fucking mirrored ceilings.

Jim crouched down beside him, then touched one hand to Sebastian’s forehead.

“Go to sleep, sweetheart,” he said. “We’re going to have all sorts of lovely murders to commit in the morning.”

You had to behead a king. But, Sebastian learned, when you put a bullet between the eyes of a simple nightmare, they stayed dead.

#

“Did you know, it’s almost your birthday,” Jim said, one day.

“How can you even tell?” Sebastian said. Time didn’t convert well into dreams—things stuttered forward, slid by, and doubled back on themselves; the sun didn’t set and the moon didn’t rise in any discernible pattern, and time was more of a hazy feeling than an actuality. If Sebastian had been told to pick the days apart from each other, he couldn’t have done it.

“I know everything,” Jim said. “Or haven’t you figured that out by now?”

Sebastian thought about that for a moment. “So it’s almost my birthday,” he said. “What’s it even matter?” 

“It matters because I have a gift for you,” Jim said.

“Really,” Sebastian said, eyeing Jim somewhat skeptically—the only other thing Jim had ever given him was his gun, and he’d just about beaten a man to death to get that.

“Yes,” Jim said. “Although now I think I might keep it to myself, since you’re being so very ungrateful.” 

“Oh, please, please your highness, can’t I have my gift,” Sebastian said, voice flat and dry.

Jim eyed him for a moment. “Well, it’s not as if I can give it to anyone else,” he said, finally, then summoned a box from out of thin air. It’s was metal, dark metal, not exactly the sort of thing you brought to a birthday party. 

“Here you go, sweetheart, enjoy it,” Jim said, as he handed the box over.

Sebastian opened it to find a skull inside. “You got me a skull,” he said.

“I got you _your_ skull,” Jim said.

“Morbid,” Sebastian said. He picked it up out of the box—it was fucking creepy. Not that Sebastian was really surprised—Jim enjoyed being fucking creepy. It was practically a hobby. “Any reason?”

“It’s a choice,” Jim said. Sebastian eyed him.

“Alright,” he said, when Jim didn’t say anything else. “What kind of choice?” 

“An existential one,” Jim said, he kicked his legs over the arm of his throne and tilted his head back to look up at Sebastian. “The chance to stay or go.”

Sebastian looked down at the skull. “Go where, exactly?” he asked.

“Oh, you know,” Jim said, kicking his feet. “Back to _your_ world.”

Sebastian blinked at him. “I died,” he said.

“You did!” Jim said. “Well spotted! But that’s hardly unalterable.” 

Sebastian looked down at the skull and then back up at Jim again.

“Nah,” he said. “Not like I’ve got anything to do there.”

Jim smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> So there's that. To the people who had apparently been waiting for more stuff from me (I'm baffled): I don't promise to produce much now or produce is quickly. But, apparently, I am back. Also, Lumos is pretty much a retired universe at this point. I have like three unfinished Mycroft/Snape pieces sitting in the Scrivener file so if anything happens it will unfortunately be that. Honestly, it'll probably be all Jim/Sebastian from this point out, sorry about that, you can blame Amanda if this is upsetting for you.


End file.
